Month: July 2008

Life starts later in the day in Cyprus than Kuwait! But still I wake up early a little short on sleep.

It was another easy drive Protaras even though I took a wrong turn on the way, I made it on time, as everything is very close.

I only pulled out once on the wrong side of the road from a gas station. So I was surprised to see the oncoming car and moved quickly to the correct side of the road. It does help a bit to have the driver’s seat on the right, though in over a week I never could get used to looking in the rear view mirror that was to my left! Mentally computing this and the image in the mirror of what was behind me was too much to adapt to in a short period!
So driving takes focus and attention.

I had lunch at the Super S restaurant in Protaras, a 10 minute walk from the dive center. I recommend this place the owner is a local very friendly and their roasted chicken is very good. The lunch cost about 7 Euros.

Today’s dives were for practicing the skills and doing drills including taking on and off stage bottles, swimming without the mask along a line and holding my breathe with the mask off while swimming along the line. I found the swimming along the line with no mask very relaxing, I nearly fell asleep. But holding my breathe without a mask and swimming along a line is interesting, you get disoriented quickly if you have to swim along the line and turn corners which I tried as a more challenging exercise.

By the end of the diving I was tired having not done much diving recently.

So then we went back and I got ready for the diving on Sunday on the Zenobia. I was taking the tanks with me so I don’t have to re-setup my equipment for the other diving.

In the evening I purchased a local SIM card for my phone for 25 Euros which included 5 Euros of phone calls and went for a walk around the area after which we went for dinner to a nearby Chinese restaurant.

Finally, I got closer  to where I thought the apartment should be and then stopped again at a betting place and they pointed me in the right direction to finally get to the apartment.

I drove to park behind the apartment and on a side street my conditionings after 30 years of driving on the right held and I swerved the wrong way when a car was coming turning onto the narrow two way street I was on. Fortunately the drivers in Cyprus are by and large not overly aggressive or fast. The hardest thing about driving on the left is intersections and side streets. Freeways and traffic circles are OK, though they all cut the across the lanes in the traffic circles.

So, I happily extracted my down pillow from its Eagle Creek compressor sack. These sacs are like huge zip log bags with a one way valve on the bottom. So you put the thing in and roll them up and all the air is pushed out making a pillow or other compressible item less than 1/4 the original size.

So sweet dreams with my own down pillow with no noisy air conditioning, and lots of clean, humid air.

I finished the day at the dive center, then it was time to drive back to Larnaca and find the apartment where I was staying.

The drive is quite nice on a quiet new  two and three lane divided freeway and is only about 50 km driving at 100 km/hr.
I drove into Larnaca and was trying to use my fancy  telephone GPS but it doesn’t have very good maps of Larnaca. So I aimed east towards the sea and ended up finally by the marina and found Makarios road which is the last road to the east parallel with the sea.

Then I stopped and asked directions and the people were helpful even phoning for me on their mobiles to get better directions.
I wasn’t able to find my destination so I stopped the car on the side of the road by a shop sign that said no parking. I was standing next to the car looking out over the street to see if I could see where to go.

Then I saw a full size motorcycle coming towards me going the wrong way on the road. A large guy wearing a dark t-shirt and with some black pouches on his waist stopped by me and indicated aggressively that I couldn’t park there. I said I was merely stopping to look for an address.

Then moments later a black SUV pulled up and at least four men got out and came over to me aggressively saying where are you from, what do want. I said, I’m from Canada and I’m just looking for an address.  They were not being nice that’s for sure.

 
Well it had been a very long day for me. This was after flying to Cyprus the night before and not getting much rest. I was tired. So I got back in my car and moved on and they left.

So  did I get to meet the local mafia?

I have a photo of the business I discretely took a couple of days later but I will not post it as  I’m not risking libeling the mafia!!!

Arrived at Dive-Tek. It took a bit of searching as the place is set back from the road. But I enquired at another dive shop and they pointed the way. So the course started with the usual paperwork, looking at my dive certifications and dives I’ve done. There was some concern about how many deep dives I’ve done but the nature of diving in Kuwait does not allow many and I do all that I can. Well, no worries in the end.

So the classroom sessions went on for the morning and then in the afternoon we went out to dive. It is about a ten minute drive from the dive center to the dive site.

The people above are not diving with us. They are doing a shore dive. I didn’t bring the regular camera gear, this is taken with my phone camera. Yes that’s a boat pulling a parasail with a couple of tourists on it in the background.

The first dive to get the weighting right and get used to the tanks and carrying an extra tank for decompression on my side and for them to see if I’m any good at diving. The diving was easy, no currents or waves to speak of and 40 meter visibility. In fact the instructor told me I was diving too closely to him and I said I’m used to only a few meters visibility so I had to give more space.

There is not much to see only a few small fish. This is because they over fish and even fish with dynamite to get everything in the water.

The dive went OK despite it being quite a while since I’ve dove in my dry suit. On the dives I did my first valve drills. That is where you reach back and turn the valves on and off to the regulators to practice in case some day you have a leak or a free flowing regulator you can shut it down and isolate the tank so worst case you would only lose half your air, and you normally plan for such an incident. Safety first. Then it was time to drive back to Larnaca by the fast way on the freeway.